Dinner With A Rapid Test Manager

“The first thing I did was to learn what their day was like,” he told me. “Did the test process give them freedom to think? Or was the work of investigation obstructed by a smothering blanket of pre-planned test cases?”

We were interrupted briefly by the waiter taking our orders. Then my brother resumed his narrative. “And, of course, as the new manager, they needed to test me, too.”

Jon Bach sat across from me as I took notes. He was telling me about his test group at LexisNexis, a workflow solutions provider. In a bit of role reversal, I was interviewing him about his test-management methods.

Jon graduated from college as a journalist, but never pursued a career in the field. He worked as a fireman, dishwasher, bookstore clerk; he even wrote a book. Then, in 1996, I convinced him to try testing. At first, he didn’t believe he could be useful as a tester, because he wasn’t a programmer. Don’t testers have to be computer scientists? No, I told him. What you need is to be fearless about learning. You must embrace complexity. Success as a tester is determined by the speed and enthusiasm with which you learn about the products you test.

I trained Jon, and, as I predicted, he got in at Microsoft and soon distinguished himself as a tester and test leader. He gained experience in several groups there, worked for my company for a while, then went back to the Seattle area, eventually landing at LexisNexis. Today he’s respected in the Context-Driven testing community as a test manager of sparkling creativity.

I dragged him to dinner because of what he told me on the phone. He spoke of dawn patrols, Family Feud games, and “reverse” open-book testing (in which the tester asks the questions).
He mentioned color-coded test strategy, drive-by test coaching, and index-card test-status dashboards. These are not ordinary test-management practices. So, I invoked “older brother privilege” and demanded a brain dump.
“The team I inherited consisted of 15 people on four diverse projects,” Jon told me. “One project was in maintenance mode. Two others were agile-like, with testers working in two-week and six-week sprints, respectively. The fourth project was a waterfall classic, sporting a long release schedule and formal test cycles. I was the team’s third test manager that year. A few of the guys were new to the team, but most had been grinding for a while. So, they were tired, and no one had much training as a software tester.”

Jon wanted to introduce his team to Rapid Testing, which is the testing methodology I’ve developed over the past 20 years, in conjunction with Cem Kaner, Michael Bolton, and Jon himself. Rapid Testing focuses on the development of testing skill in each tester, and the testing itself is structured using heuristics and concise documentation, rather than through ponderously detailed procedures or test case management systems. It doesn’t consist of a set of approved test techniques or templates. Rather, Rapid Testing encompasses any useful test technique. “There are no best practices,” we say.

Rapid Testing is a fundamentally sapient process. In other words, we do use tools, but good people are essential to success. To cultivate that team of good people, Jon needed to do a few things quickly: establish his credibility as a tester and a leader, learn the technology being tested? learn how the testers worked, and establish a mechanism for understanding testing status each day. Here are some of his more unorthodox tactics for doing those things.

FAMILYFEUD

“I held meetings with the testers, one by one, to get a feel for what was on their minds and what they might be concerned about. Based on what I heard, I made up a survey and sent it around.”

The survey included open-ended questions such as “What are three aspects of your ideal manager?” and “What one project problem do you wish was solved now?” It also included some questions that were more closed and somewhat less serious, such as “Name the most interesting project codename we’ve used” and “Name a customer that tends to be mentioned a lot in meetings.”

Jon used a creative way to announce the results of the survey. “We played Family Feud,” he said. “You know, that game where they survey 100 people about everyday objects, events, and choices. Then the contestants have to guess the results of the survey.” So, he put on a suit and tie and played emcee. After he revealed the results, he took off the tie and told the testers what he was going to do to follow up on their answers.

OPEN–BOOKTESTINGANDDAWNPATROLS

“I asked the testers to create a set of ‘quiz’ questions about each of the products they were testing,” Jon said. “Then I answered the questions by working with those products while they watched. That way, they could see me learning. It was basically an open-book test.”

The quiz questions included these:

What’s the difference between tags, notes, and issues?

How can you blank an entire database?

Where can you change field properties?

How can you tell who’s in the database at the same time as you?

The point of an open-book quiz is not to test knowledge; it’s to drive learning and develop resourcefulness. Open-book testing is a great way to teach new testers about a particular technology. You don’t tell them what it is and how to use it. Instead, you ask them questions and have them find the answers themselves. As testers learn, they also may find bugs. By putting himself through that process, Jon earned credibility with the team.

“The dawn patrols also helped me learn the products, but they were more about getting the testers to learn about a more professional approach to exploratory testing,” Jon told me as I tried to eat salad right-handed while taking notes. “A dawn patrol is a group testing event held before normal working hours. We did one a week for four weeks. We picked a product to test, and each tester tried to find bugs in it. There’s a lot of crosstalk and questions going back and forth. My role was to take notes. My computer screen was projected on a wall so they could see what I was writing. Apart from observing how they tested, I was introducing them to the idea of note-taking and responding to scrutiny.”

Managing Rapid Testing requires a very hands-on approach, at least some of the time. Jon wanted his testers to see him get involved, to know that he was a true tester himself. He also needed to model for them the behavior he expected from a professional tester. And, of course, he needed to learn all he could about the products they were testing. Open-book testing and dawn patrols are a good way to get that done.

STATUSREPORTINGEXPERIMENTS

“I had the testers do daily written status reports for a while, but stopped after a couple of months. I also experimented with index cards, asking testers to post the cards, where a list of testing tasks were written, on their cubicle walls. We don’t do that anymore either.”

Getting written status reports on a daily basis initially helped Jon get a feel for the rhythm of work on each of the test projects. The reports consisted of two sections: highlights and blocking issues. But as he gained a feel for the team, he began to manage more by walking around. He also attended the stand-up meetings for the two Scrum projects. After a couple of months, it became clear that daily status reports were no longer needed.

This an example of the “Training Wheels” effect in process improvement. A team that tries a new process may later drop it because they have learned something or changed in some way that makes the process unnecessary. Some organizations cling to procedures and paperwork that have lost their relevance. Unable to shed the training wheels, they slow themselves down. With Rapid Testing, however, we regularly ask ourselves if a simpler process might work better.

The index cards worked well, allowing Jon to get team status just by walking around, but one of the testers realized that ScrumWorksPro would enable them to do the same thing online.

‘LET’S TRY THAT’

I asked Jon what process improvements had been suggested by the testers.

“Color-coded test matrixes,” he said. “The idea came from McDonald’s, with its annual Monopoly promotion. I was collecting the pieces and posting them on my cubicle wall. One of the testers dropped by to talk about Rapid Test design and he challenged me to explain what Monopoly had to do with testing. Thinking fast, I suggested that, just as the different colors of Monopoly properties indicate their value, colors could be used to assign value to different tests. I challenged him to put that idea into practice. He decided to try color-coding his testing spreadsheet so that we could see, at a glance, the different kinds of tests on it.”

“Are you still doing that?” I asked.

“Nope. It turns out the way he did it took a little too much work. It was hard to keep up with it. We have to find an easier way to use color. But I’m glad we tried it.”

“OK. Name an innovation that did stick.”

“Hmm. Hybrid test cases.”

“What are those?”

“That’s a kind of partially documented test procedure,” Jon said. “It’s not a detailed step-by-step thing, but it’s not a typical exploratory testing charter either. It’s more like a checklist of things to see and do. It’s another idea that came from the team. I was telling them that we could test better and faster if we stopped using thick test procedure documentation. But one of the testers felt that the hybrid approach could give him the structure he wanted while cutting way down on paperwork. I think it’s working for him.”

Rapid Testing works partly because it prompts a tester to ask questions like these: What testing is needed here and now? How do we prepare ourselves for testing that we’ll need to do tomorrow? Are we delivering the information our clients need? Those questions are asked again and again. Every day. Several times a day. Who asks them? Whoever is leading the testing. But in Rapid Testing, you’re either a test leader or you’re training to become one. Jon and I believe that testing is a challenging intellectual investigation, and Rapid Testing is about getting the most out of people to meet that challenge.

That’s why encouraging testers to try experiments with the test process is so important. They try things, they learn from them, and they come to own the process for themselves. This gives them confidence and makes them more committed to their work.

THECOMMONTHREAD

When Jon joins a test team, he does have his own favorite ways of working. He’s biased toward exploratory testing and session-based test management. He’s skeptical of thick documentation and grandiose test automation. But that’s not what’s most interesting about his style of leadership.

The thing that strikes me most is that he takes a service approach to leadership. He listens before he directs. He submits himself to the judgment of his team to earn their trust. He wants each tester to be more powerful and marketable as a result of working for him. Jon looks at a testing situation not in terms of a machine that must operate in some rigorous and inhuman way. Nor does he view a testing situation as a math problem to be solved. Instead, he sees a team of people, with a variety of backgrounds, skills, and talents, helping each other understand the state of a product.

To test well, there’s no substitute for testers who learn fast, have good ideas, and keep their eyes and minds open. In our experience, a small number of testers, creatively led and properly trained, can outperform a legion of script drones.

About the Author

James Marcus Bachstarted in this business as a programmer. He likes programming, but finds the problems of software quality analysis and improvement more interesting than those of software production. For him, there’s something very compelling about the question “How do I know my work is good?” Indeed, how does he know anything is good? What does good mean? That’s why he got into SQA in 1987.

Today, he works with project teams and individual engineers to help them plan SQA, change control, and testing processes that allow them to understand and control the risks of project failure. He also assists in product risk analysis, test design, and in the design and implementation of computer-supported testing. Most of his experience is with market-driven Silicon Valley software companies like Apple Computer and Borland, so the techniques he’s gathered and developed are designed for use under conditions of compressed schedules, high rates of change, component-based technology and poor specification.